


after that, the road

by summerboysam



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Ghost Sam Winchester, M/M, Sam Winchester Dies, So yeah, Soulmates Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Wincest if you squint, alright so to give you a sense of why this is fucked up, and doesn't leave, but also just canon typical sam&dean, i got inspired by dean sitting next to sam's rotting corpse for some time when he dies in cold oak, my idea of how spn should end, wuthering heights inspired
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-03 18:07:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14001657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerboysam/pseuds/summerboysam
Summary: Sam can’t figure out whether he’s bound to his rotting flesh, his battered bones strewn among the arsenal in the trunk, or if he’s bound to this car (the leather of the seats, the rattling band of army men, the carvings in the walls). Or maybe it’s Dean. It’s probably Dean, in death as well as in life.-----Sam dies and doesn't leave. Dean follows soon. The world keeps turning.





	after that, the road

**Author's Note:**

> This is how I always figured SPN should end. The brothers, their car, some tragedy. 
> 
> This isn't set in any specific season and isn't canon-compliant I guess. Sam got out of the cage, somehow, and none of the shit after happened. Yay.
> 
> Enjoy.

Sam dies on a Wednesday. He had woken up that morning, thrown off the stained blanket and left the motel to go for a run. He had known for about a week, that it was time, soon. That morning, the trees had whispered to him, the crows had stayed closer to the trail he tread than normal. He had almost expected his headaches to return like vicious knives, but that part of his life was over.

He watches the landscape pass by, now, the same perspective as always from his shotgun vantage point. It’s all the same; the world keeps turning like Sam Winchester did not just bite a chainsaw in an abandoned outlaw cabin. The wheat still sways in the wind, the cables span languid and steady across the fields, the birds chirp and the Impala hums, and hums and hums ever on. 

Sam can’t figure out whether he’s bound to his rotting flesh, his battered bones strewn among the arsenal in the trunk, or if he’s bound to this car (the leather of the seats, the rattling band of army men, the carvings in the walls). Or maybe it’s Dean. It’s probably Dean, in death as well as in life. 

The motor howls and growls and devours gravel like a hound its prey, but it is still quiet. Dean had not turned on any music since he had packed up all of the bits and pieces that were once his brother, packed them up the same way he had packed up all his belongings, duffel slung across his shoulder to depart to another crap motel, seventy-five miles from Nowhere. Sam had always hated how easy it was to pack up his entire life, just throw it all into a bag and leave, no hang ups. He likes it, now, that it’s so easy to pack him up and take him with. Likes that Dean did not drive back to the motel to pick up all his clothes and knick-knacks, because he packed up all his life outside of that cabin, among the muddy branches and fallen leaves.)

Sam had been a ghost before, but this time it’s different. He can feel the void tugging on his nonexistent blood, if it’s Heaven or Hell or Nothingness calling he doesn’t know. He feels himself tethered to this place more thoroughly than when he was alive. He’d never felt himself part of his body, anyway, felt almost floating on good days, heavy and weighed down and chained on bad days. After Lucifer, there hadn’t been good days anymore. If he’d known that all it took to stop feeling bugs crawl through his veins, was to rip his body limb from limb, he thinks he would have tried sooner. Except of course he wouldn’t have, because _Dean_. 

Dean, who sits beside him same as always, who is the focus point, the only thing keeping him tethered to reality, only _for real now_. He stares straight ahead, jaw clenched, eyes dry. Sam wonders if he can feel his brother next to him. Oh, he would be so mad, that righteous anger that always made Sam want to break his nose, punch his knuckles bloody and shredded on his jawline. The world may have forgotten, but Sam would always remember, that Dean was The Righteous Man, holy, sacred, blessed. A living, breathing saint, as terrible and beautiful as any angel they had met along their journey. With one foot to the other side, he can see it more than ever, the light clinging to his brother’s every cell. It doesn’t make him feel as sick, now. There’s nothing coursing through his veins anymore, not his own blood, not Hell’s. He’s just Sam. 

Dean’s fighting, still. Dean’s never been one to give up without a fight, and Dean’s always been one to fight with fists and busted lips and scraped-raw knees, crawling towards his goals, gun in hand, even with his guts strewn over the floor. Dean’s fights always got messy. Sam knows. He’s the same. 

He stays in the car whenever Dean goes to do what he’s gotta do, now that Sam’s rotting away with every passing second (they can’t smell it when they’re driving, but parked like this, windows down – it’s a special kind of weird). He feels safe in here, like he belongs. The Impala had always been home. He likes that it is his resting place, for now. From inside the warehouse, screams sound. He hears Dean shout something. The clanking of chains. He’s seen what Dean is capable of, has learned in Hell. Not that any of it matters. Dean will join him soon, he knows. Sam is content. 

Dean goes through the motions. He had gotten a motel room the first night of sleep he got, after Sam. He had gotten a double and Sam had chuckled to himself as Dean went inside. He hadn’t followed, and Dean hadn’t slept in a motel since. 

Now he simply pulls onto a shoulder in the middle of nowhere and lays down in the back seat (closer to Sam). Dean talks as if he’s still there, and also as if he’s talking to himself. _We should stop for gas later, Sammy_ and _Alright let’s crash._ Sam answers him every time and Dean answers back. He knows Dean can’t hear him, is just rehashing conversations they’ve had countless of times before. It’s nice, though. Feels normal. 

The days go on and Dean becomes desperate. He’s taken to driving drunk. Not _half a bottle ‘o whiskey drunk_ as he has always been, but really drunk, _full bottle o’ jack and a coupla beers_ drunk. Sam knows Dean will join him soon, but he’d rather not have it be because Dean wrapped himself around a fucking tree. The car deserves better. He deserves better. 

So he throws out all of Dean’s alcohol while Dean’s off in the woods, following a lead on a supposed powerful coven practicing death magick. He takes all the bottles scattered over the seats, the floorboards, among the weapons and the bones, and drains them right onto the ground. Dean comes back with an ugly gash over the length of his face and goes straight for the bottle. He stills with it in his hand, then mutters a quiet little _Yeah, Sammy_ and drops it. 

Over the weeks, the gash turns into a big, mottled, pink scar. Dean keeps looking at it in the back mirror, _oh that’s badass, Sammy._ Sam hates it. For the first time, he resents being bound to Dean, because if he weren’t, he’d have gone right back into those woods and torn every single one of those fucking witches into as many pieces as he himself is currently in. How dare they. Dean seems to sense Sam’s anger, or maybe he just remembers Sam well enough to know what he’d have to say about the ugly, ugly, _ugly_ fucking scar slicing his face in two. 

It’s time. It has been time for weeks now. Why won’t Dean just give up already?

No demon will make a deal. No angel will give up under torture. No witch spell worked. Death didn’t answer. Dean’s soul is more mangled than ever. The light is still shining out of him, as it always will, but now there’s dark under it and Sam feels sick again. He doesn’t want to see this. He feels he has to, though. So he starts to leave the car. He stands next to Dean when he pulls ribbons of flesh off a meatsuit. He kneels behind him when Dean chants the words to a Sumerian ritual that they both know won’t work. He sits in the corner hugging his knees when Dean smashes his fist into the mirror of a gas station bathroom again and again and again, and then starts peeling at the scar across his face until it bleeds again. It doesn’t make Sam angry this time. Feeling anything has become so hard, and he knows it’s because he’s not supposed to be here anymore. He knows, and yet. And yet. 

The next time they stop, it’s on the shoulder of a highway, a little trail leading off into the fields and towards an old church barely visible in the darkness of night. Sam knows that this is it. Dean laughs out loud, says _Gotta try, Sammy, you know I always gotta try_ and Sam knows that Dean knows. This is it. He breathes a sigh of relief that comes out cold as ice. Dean freezes, turns towards the passenger seat (and only now Sam notices that it’s the first time he’s done that since the cabin) and chuckles, _Sammy_ and then _love ya buddy_. He smiles that smile he always has, righteous and sure and sad and happy and reassuring and calm, everything at once. Then, he throws open the driver’s seat door and walks away, off into the woods. 

Sam doesn’t follow him this time, he knows it’s pointless and that Dean needs to do this for himself. He hears screams, again, and Dean shouting something, again, and then there’s gunfire. Then silence. Sam wonders what would happen if Dean died right now. Would he disappear, too, because there was nothing keeping him? Or would he stay bound to Dean, although Dean’s soul had left the building, doomed to spend eternity watching his brother’s corpse and his own corpse slowly disintegrate into dust, here, on the side of this highway, next to the one and only home they ever had? 

Crows are sitting in the wheats, staring at him, staring off into the distance, towards the church. None of them move, and so does Sam.

Dean stumbles out of the dark and into Sam’s field of vision just ten minutes later. He is holding his hands to his stomach, gun and all. Blood drips down to the ground, thick, dark splotches staining the dirt and making patterns in the sand. Dean takes one look towards the passenger seat, then grimaces and drags himself towards the trunk. Sam feels his reality flicker and shake. A second later, he appears next to Dean. His brother popped the trunk and propped up the false bottom. He stares inside a couple seconds, and so does Sam. He still feels no attachment to his body. Just a collection of guts and bones and viscera, just as it had been when it was still whole and running around. 

The next few steps are mechanical, just like any salt and burn. Dean pulls out a canister of gasoline and empties it over the Impala. He fishes around a while and slides down to the ground, his back leaning on the car, matchbox and salt in hand. He throws some back over his shoulder, into the trunk, then on himself. He grinds his teeth when some lands in his gut.

He closes his eyes when Sam sits down next to him. He makes no sign of noticing his presence, but Sam is sure he knows Sam is still here. Not able to see him, but he knows.   
His brother, the anchor of his soul, the center of his world, opens his eyes, looks up at the sky, then fumbles with the box. He drops it in his lap a couple of times. Sam can see the gaping wound in his stomach now, the glistening guts beneath shreds of clothes and skin. His entire lower half is black with blood now.

Finally, he gets hold of a match, tosses the box aside and holds it up in front of his face. When Sam lights it up, Dean laughs. The sound is strained and pained and gravelly, how Sam had heard it a thousand times before. 

Seconds before the fire reaches the tank, Dean finally looks at him, _really_ looks at him again. _Let’s go, little brother._

Then, flames. 

…..

Sam is running through the woods, not away from anything, just running. The sun is beating down on him, the trees whisper and the leaves rustle with the wind. Dad is on a hunt, and he and Dean had been left at a cabin in the woods, with the instruction of keeping up their training, so Sam had taken off in the morning to go running. It has always been his favorite form of exercise. The sounds, the smells, just him and his beating pulse. Moments like this, he feels grounded, at peace. Finally present and connected in a way he never is otherwise.

Suddenly, it is night. He stumbles out onto a stretch of road. To his right, he can hear the familiar sound of rubber eating away fast and steady at gravel. The Impala stops in front of him and he sees Dean, whole and beautiful, no scar across his features, skin not bubbling with heat. 

_Let’s go, Sammy._

After that, it’s the road.

Forever.

**Author's Note:**

> these boys will kill me


End file.
